Best film never made

Picture the scene: a futuristic drama set on a spaceship transporting a notorious Mafia mobster back to jail. Cut to a close-up of Humphrey Bogart in a tight embrace with Diane Keaton. Suddenly Robert de Niro and his glamorous sidekick Marilyn Monroe break down the door, all guns blazing ...

Welcome to Operation: Orion, or the greatest film never made. It may sound like a fantastical pitch, but an analysis of the most popular films of all time claims to have uncovered the exact recipe of what makes a movie great. And the result is outlined above.

The survey, carried out by Amazon.co.uk, analysed the genre, plot, stars and even the words in the titles of the most popular 100 films at its Internet Movie Database site - a list compiled by the votes of up to 50,000 film fans, each awarding marks out of 10.

The results show that the following ingredients are most likely to ensure a film is a success:

Genre: dramas rate the highest, with classics such as The Godfather, The Shawshank Redemption and Citizen Kane accounting for eight of the top 10 films.

Plot: the perfect plot combines boy meets girl and good versus evil, set in the future. Think Star Wars and Bladerunner, with touches of Casablanca and The Seven Samurai.

Leading men: you need a big star to sell a movie and there are four names which appear time and time again in our favourite films - Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford, James Stewart and Robert de Niro.

Leading ladies: glamour is a bonus but there is no substitute for character and class. First on the casting couch, in the fans' opinion, would be Diane Keaton, Jodie Foster, Marilyn Monroe, Carrie Fisher and Sigourney Weaver.

Supporting actors: it's an all-star cast that would include Kevin Spacey, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Tom Hanks and Charlie Chaplin.

Title: it's best to have two words, and should ideally include a place, a person's name or an animal. Classic examples include American Beauty, Schindler's List, Citizen Kane, LA Confidential, Reservoir Dogs and Raging Bull. It's no coincidence that the Top 100 of all time fails to include Revenge Of The Nerds IV: Nerds In Love or The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies.

Period: by working out the average year of the films picked, the perfect time to make (and set) a movie would have been 1954. Which presumably means it would also be in black-and-white.

This fantasy is all very well, but of course, reality wouldn't work like that. If you could come up with the formula for the perfect film, you would be the richest person in Hollywood. And, as IMDb managing director Col Needham admitted: "Most movie buffs generally avoid formulaic films."